Good day all and welcome to this week's Dev Diary for EUIV. It's also our final one of the year and as such it's going to be a meaty one. Indeed today is my last day in the office before I take a decadently long Christmas and New Year vacation. I'll be burning some whisky barrels on the open fireplace and melting to my sofa while my cats and dog lay with me in the freezing wastes of the Scottish Highlands. With that to look forward to, I'll get on with today's matter at hand: we're going to talk about reflections on the year, including Rule Britannia, Dharma and Golden Century, how we use forum feedback and suggestions, as well as our plans going forward into 2019. This'll be a big one, so buckle up.
This year started strong with the release of Rule Britannia in March. It was our second Immersion pack and our way of confirming if we wanted to keep going forward with the Immersion Pack model for EU4. We had released Third Rome as an Immersion Pack before, and while both its sales and reception were lukewarm, its release was right alongside our price change debacle. With Rule Britannia, we were able to try an Immersion Pack again in clearer conditions. Again, we wanted to make a DLC for the game, smaller and tighter in scope, where we focused on Britain, and making features and content which was lighter on Code, and heavier on Script and Art. To this end, it pioneered the new Mission Trees, came with unit models and music as well as some new gameplay features for half the price of a regular expansion.
Rule Britannia exceeded all our expectations, performing record-breakingly well in sales for EUIV, while also gaining favourable reception. It was clear to us that there was a place for these types of DLC. While the sales and reception were great, there was still feedback by way of the content not being deep or meaningful enough, particularly for our core fanbase (If you're reading this, then that's you guys) So our decision was to produce both large expansions and tighter Immersion Packs, meaning Dharma was up next.
Ah Dharma. I remember standing up on the stage at PDXCon, having been asked to do a presentation about it. I don't remember what I said up there and I certainly didn't know what I was going to say. I knew I wanted to just say the word “Dharma” with conviction, and the rest would probably follow. I don't recall the audience getting up and leaving, so the presentation probably went well.
Dharma released in September and was a typical $20 expansion with the usual array of features and an Indian focus. It came with an unusual level of re-working old features, but also took the unorthodox (for EU4) direction of taking old content and making it free. We freed up the Estates feature, shook it up a touch and this, I feel, comes with the unspoken promise of continuing to support and work on this feature.
All well and good, but how do we look at the release from our perspective at Paradox? While Rule Britannia set some records for EUIV, Dharma came and broke them again. It proved to sell extremely well, but it then opened up some interesting discussion, because it reviewed fairly terribly, at (another record-breaking) 35% on Steam at time of writing.
Now the honest truth here from my perspective is that reviews weigh ounces while sales weigh pounds. One cannot put food on the table with a good review, but they can with good sales. If I was asked if I want a release to sell well or I want it to review well, I'll ask for both, but if I may only have one, I'll take the sales numbers. I'm telling you that not (only) because I am a terribly greedy individual, but because that is how we weigh up success and I'd rather be clear with you on that than give some fuzzy, corporate response.
This comes with one massive however. This is not to say that we do not take feedback and reviews into account. Far from it. I've personally read every single review we've had on this year's releases, positive, negative, even Google Translated if need be. We do set aside some real time to check what people enjoyed, what they did not and address what we can. Case in point, there was a huge amount of feedback, both before release and in reviews, slamming the free patch that shipped with Dharma, particularly with the Corruption from Territories and Religious Conversion changes. In this case, we made a redesign of the conversions, making a small change in the followup 1.27 Poland Update to allow conversions with Religious Ideas, then when time was more permitting, making a change to how conversions cost for 1.28. There is still dissatisfaction about how corruption in territories work, I've certainly been reading the threads with interest, but this is in line with our vision for the game. Complaints are not without merit, but it's unlikely that the mechanic will change any time soon.
After Dharma we put out the 1.27 Poland Update, and fittingly had one of our biggest events of the year for the game at the Polish LAN party. It was an amazing time and the absolute most fun one can have playing the game in my humble opinion, I'll cast the limelight
over to others who have
covered the event in their own ways
This beat the office Streaming Studio in terms of grandeur solidly
Flags, props and amazing cosplay all around
Groogy wore some of his casual attire for the event
After the aforementioned Poland update came Golden Century, another Immersion Pack, so the same vein as Rule Britannia and Third Rome. This went live just 7 days ago, and while that's a pretty short timeframe to draw many conclusions on a DLC release, I'm going to live dangerously and draw them anyway.
Let's not beat around the bush, there has been plenty of dissatisfaction in the community on Golden Century. We've not been blind to the plethora of comments, posts, threads and ratings showing that the Immersion Pack we've been making and delivered is not what you have been anticipating, and there's no amount of fancy talking I can do to dismiss that. There have been particular concerns about lacking focus on Spain/Portugal, wanting deeper changes to Colonization, overall feeling that the Immersion Pack is feature-light, feedback being ignored and plenty others.
Certainly, I put my hands up and say that yes, there were certainly some ill-placed priorities on Golden Century. Most glaring of these were that we talked about what we were doing and planning with you, the community, much too late. It compounded most other issues, so that expectations about what we were going to do were not set from the start, our design and features were too locked-in for much iteration, and the feedback and suggestions that we got, many of which were really good were just not implemented, not because we didn't like them, but because we'd already gotten to a point where we weren't in a position to act on them. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which side of verification&QA you're on) we don't tend to keep working on a release up to the week/day/hour of release.
That doesn't account for all things though. There are certainly those who feel that they weren't getting what they wanted in terms of deep mechanical reworks or large changes to the game. On this I have to put up a defense. Immersion Packs are designed to deliver content for the focus regions and specifically not large gameplay reworks. You'll not see a Government Overhaul or an Empire of China+Tributaries in an Immersion Pack. In an Immersion Pack you'll certainly find new Music for the region, new unit models, Dynamic Historical Events, features for the focused nation, map changes and other revisions. If what you're wanting from an Immersion Pack are the features of the magnitude that we put in our larger expansions, then we will not be able to meet that expectation.
With that said, Golden Century did not match up to the level of quality that you've come to expect, and for that we need to do better.
I don't want to completely drop the point about feedback and suggestions though. A sad outcome from this is that people are feeling their suggestions are just not listened to. This couldn't be much farther from the truth, and I'll be getting back to this just a little further down.
All said and done though, Golden Century was released last week and, while the reviews are not so hot, it's performing admirably as releases go, telling us that we can continue to deliver successful Immersion Packs, but we absolutely need to handle development and communication better.
From now though, there are precious few days before the company as a whole shuts down and only the bravest of souls march into the office to keep the gears of development turning. That'll bring a wrap to 2018, which has been a pretty great year for the EUIV Team. Said team has seen its members come and go, but remain in high spirits and committed to delivering exciting content for the game. In particular this year we have seen the swelling of our ranks with new blood, either new to the company or new to the project (people can and do switch from project to project) while giving bittersweet farewells to those who have left the project such as @Trin Tragula who slipped into a time vortex and ended up long before the Birth of Christ, to live out his Roman fantasies in Imperator.
With that as a reflection on 2018, let's turn to the topic of Suggestions and Feedback. Recently I spied a post which went along the lines of “can we have a dev diary on suggestions” and I think that's a great idea.
So we have a suggestions subforum here where many threads get put up. Users post their ideas on how the game can be improved and what features or balances they would like to see in the game. It's a wonderful place where, regardless if the proposed solution is something we want to directly implement, gives us inspiration and ideas and also highlights what people see as issues in our game in a highly constructive manner.
A considerably chunk of my time, as well as @Groogy and @neondt 's is spent looking through these suggestions. We don't give feedback on everything we read there, and indeed it would be criminal mismanagement of time to do so, but we do read and read often. Suggestions there, both big and small get made and sometimes result in tangible change for the game. A question we've had before is “What does it take for a suggestion to be implemented”. There's hardly a single answer to this, and a variety of ways things get implemented. Sometimes a suggestion can result in a different inspired solution to a problem that's being cited, sometimes mechanics emerge which are similar to those posted. In rare cases, entire suggestions are so good they get face-lifted straight into the game. Let's take a look at some examples, and talk best practices.
Here is an example of a suggestion so good they we had to implement it near enough as-is. A remarkably well constructed post, highlighting all necessary changes that should be made, including province layout, trade goods, city placement and more, as well as containing local information that is harder for us to source to back them up.
Another great and well constructed proposal which covers nearly all bases. It contains a plethora of ideas, not all of which are likely to make it into the game, but a solid suggestion which will no doubt see some manifestation in the game.
Of course, these are fairly massive suggestion post examples, and are not what everyone is expecting or expected to bring the table. We also have lots of smaller suggestions and compilation suggestions which prove useful. A notable example is
the achievement compilation thread
Often the smaller gameplay suggestions such as events you could see being improved are great for us to see. The important thing in any suggestion is to Identify the issue and then explain what your improvement is. Often it’s getting the finger on exactly what needs improvement is more important than the fine details on what should be done, as the latter often has many different approaches.
@neondt recently posted a good framework for such suggestions, particularly for events:
Example:
Event name:
Clergy condemns philosopher as heretic
Event ID (if known):
724
Perceived Issue:
Event essentially unchanged from EU3. Unavoidable stability hit is overly punishing and doesn't necessarily fit the flavour.
Suggested Improvement:
Remove stabhit, make penalties better/harsher for each opposed choice
Click to expand...
Now, one particular comment that I've been chewing on over the last few weeks was (paraphrased) thus: “I feel like I cannot make the best suggestions I can in a meaningful time when we don't know what the EUIV team is working on until they're pretty much done with it” Now this is something that ties wonderfully into our next topic for today's monster dev diary: Our plans going forward. Previously I've been hesitant to post much of a public roadmap of what EUIV has planned or has ambition for, but I'll not have it said that I'm too hard-headed to change my mind.
Taking it from the top, 2019 will be a very different year of development for EUIV. We will be slowing down development of new features and expansions, at least for the first half of the year. We shall be taking time to focus on two main things in EUIV: Tech Debt and Quality of Life
Tech Debt covers all sorts of things that accumulate over time when we develop our games. It's things like bugs that accumulate (truce timers not lining up with the tooltip? That's tech debt), performance (new features and map updates slowing the game down? That's tech debt) systems that we put in place being cumbersome to work with and slowing down other development? That's tech debt. Generally we set time aside every release to tackle this, but over the past 5+ years of post-release development, we have accumulated more than we've chewed through. To this end, we will be taking a very serious stab at issues and working through the issues that have been building up over this time.
Quality of Life are those usability issues that make you stop for a moment and glare at the game. It's when the tooltip for taking gold covers the green checkmark in the peace deal screen, or when you want to tell your auto-diplomats to deal with a specific bunch of nations but you cannot specify them. We get many suggestions of these in the forums, we have many ideas on them internally, and we get subtly reminded of them in fangatherings. Indeed, those who were at the Polish LAN party were kind enough to give me one or two game suggestions themselves, which will no doubt find their way on our internal list to work through. We will be making a list of the most pressing QoL issues, and working through them with reckless abandon.
Me reading suggestions from the Poland event. First I saw the auto trade company toggle suggestion
Then I saw the Balkan Cultures suggestion
This tech debt and quality of life work will manifest themselves in an expansion release we are planning towards the end of the year. We will be working on a massive European expansion, with a scope of pretty much everything from Bretton Brest to Byzantine Constantinople. While it'll be some time before we go into detail on what we want to do with this expansion, we have our own internal wishlist of things to tackle. This is not a guarantee that all will be dealt with in said expansion, but it is what we wish to achieve.
- Endless, immortal mercenaries need to be reigned in
- the HRE system, which is largely unchanged from EU3 needs to evolve
- Make Catholicism and the Pope feel like a force to be reckoned with, rather than just another colour of Christianity and country
- Flesh out mission trees for more countries.
- Make manpower and attrition more meaningful
- Improve custom nation options.
- Up the standard of the map across Europe, including Balkans, Italy, France and Germany.
There will no doubt be more to come, but I want to give a general idea of what we're looking at in 2019. Tech Debt, Quality of Life and a massive European Expansion. There will be some smaller patches along the way, likely bugfixes and perhaps a small content update along the way, as well as some new surprises, but the bulk of 2019 is going towards this one big release.
And we want to make sure that you are involved along the way. No doubt there will be people with their own fixes, quality of life features or European changes they want to see in the game. We'll be taking in feedback and suggestions moreso than ever, and hopefully clarifying that this will be a long development cycle will ensure that changes and iteration can take place in a timely manner.
I encourage such quality of life requests and longstanding bugs to be posted up or brought forward to us, and we shall be doing our utmost to crush the bugs and implement the QoLs (hopefully in that order)
Of course, this means that, particularly in early 2019, we're going to see some quieter dev diaries, where we may just highlight some particular fixes and QoL changes we make, before we ramp up towards the meat of what's coming in the European Expansion. There'll also be some other surprise things that we'll be talking about as we start picking up steam again next year.
And that's our final, and likely longest dev diary for the year. I hope we've managed to shed some light on previously nebulous places, and before I jet off to the cold and unforgiving Highlands I'll stick around to field any questions you may have for the rest of the day, listing them below.
